If it’s autumn, it must be Tony Hawk season. Yup, it’s time for the leaves to fall and the skaters to bail. Tony’s latest game — his ninth — once again puts you in the role of a young skater trying to make a name for himself in the extreme sports world. Activision’s Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground won’t wow you with innovation, but it does hit you with a few new tricks to keep things interesting.

Once again, PS2 owners get the short end of the board. Unlike the next-gen games which promise unparalleled levels of customization, crazy video modes, and a seamless integration of the single-player and online games, the last-gen crowd gets a Story mode, a few barebones two-player modes, and a turn-your-ps2-off-and-go-outside mode. The Story mode starts with letting you design your own skater. And just like in Project 8, you’re stuck with only male skaters to play as. If you’re a girl — or you just like to skate as one — you’re out of luck when it comes to creating an avatar that may or may not resemble you.

Next it’s off to choose a career path. In kind of a neat move, Proving Ground lets you determine the story mode by choosing one of three types of person — and skater — you want to be. If you’re “Hardcore,” you don’t care what anyone thinks. You’re just out to skate for yourself and if anyone gets in your way, you’re not afraid to skate right over them. If you’re a “Rigger,” you’re creative and fearless. You seek out the lines and tricks that no sane person would attempt — and then you do them. If you’re “Career,” you’re more about making a living in the skate scene. You’re into the fame, the travel and the money.

In theory this would make a lot of sense. You get to choose your career path and skills that you need to level up in the same way you do in an RPG when you decide to become a mage instead of a warrior or a rogue instead of a warlock. Out on the streets of Philly, though, leveling up gets kind of rough. Very quickly into the game, you’ll easily nail the initial Hardcore, Rigger and Career challenges. Development, I’m assuming wanted to give gamers a taste of all three choices before forcing them to make a decision. Then I looked around for more stuff to do… and looked. Finally, I spy Tony Hawk, himself. He tosses an easy grinding challenge at me. After that, he throws me a manual challenge — a completely hell-tastic manual challenge.

I’ve been playing Hawk games since the original Pro Skater and I can never remember a challenge this early being so difficult. The manual meter has been tweaked a bit since Project 8, but that shouldn’t ramp up the difficulty this much. To make matters worse, for some reason, Hawk’s character decided to wander into the center of the street — smack in the middle of the path I had to manual — halfway through the 45-minutes that it took me to pass the challenge. I’m not sure what the actual record is, but I’m guessing that I might currently hold the record for screaming “Eff you, Tony!” the most in a half-hour period. Adding to the frustration was the fact that if you decided to skip the challenge, there was absolutely nothing else to do. No other characters to talk to. Nothing.

Finally, I passed the challenge and like a giant graffiti-covered urban flower, the game blossomed and opened up. Within seconds, I had a billion new challenges to plow through and I was able to skip from gritty inner-city Philly to the just-as-gritty downtown Baltimore.

Unlike the next-gen crowd who get to compare this version of Hawk to EA’s recent juggernaut, skate, the PS2 crowd can only compare this Hawk to the last Hawk. While it does improve over its predecessor in a number of ways, the improvements are the same sorts of baby steps that we’ve come to expect from the series. There’s nothing truly ground-breaking here and if Activision had decided to call the thing “Project 9″ no one would have batted an eye.